Category: Hardware

There are many IoT hardware boards on the market today. Windows 10 IoT Core has some very specific hardware requirements, so only a few of the boards available support the the ability to run Windows 10 IoT Core and using Visual Studio 2015 for building Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Apps to run on them. One of these boards, the Raspberry Pi, is very popular, but not all Raspberry Pi boards are compatible. There are a few other IoT boards that are supported as well. This post lists out the IoT boards that are currently supported by Windows 10 IoT Core. Read More

Traditionally building Internet of Things (IoT) devices using a platform such as the Raspberry Pi required you to know a little about electronics. You needed to either solder or use a breadboard to connect sensors or servos or whatever to the Raspberry Pi header / GPIO pins correctly. Plus you needed to know when to use a resistor or other component appropriately. The GrovePi+ from Dexter Industries provides a really easy to use Plug-n-Play platform for building IoT devices such as home automation, monitoring or any other Internet of Things scenario! Read More

The Internet of Things hardware landscape is heating up. There’s tons of devices available with many new devices being released every few months. One of the latest devices in the new Intel Joule. This is an IoT powerhouse with the specs that desktop computers had just a few years ago. The Intel Joule is built to be a high-performance platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), and It packs a quad-core 1.7 Ghz Intel Atom processor (CPU), 4GB RAM, Wifi and Bluetooth, all with additional 4K video support as well! Read More

The IoT hardware landscape is ever changing from the new Raspberry Pi 3 to various Arduino boards. One thing Raspberry Pi has offered that Arduino hasn’t been capable of is to run Windows IoT Core. Now, the add-on device market for Raspberry Pi with Windows IoT Core has remained somewhat limited, as Windows IoT Core is still fairly new. This has meant wiring up servos, sensors and other things has been difficult for the average developer. With the introduction of the new Microsoft IoT Grove Kit you can now easily plugin servos, sensors, etc. with a single plug that really stream lines the prototyping process! Read More

The Microsoft Azure Cost Estimator Tool allows for the necessary hosting resources of an enterprise environment to be mocked up as the appropriate Azure instances that match, then it will estimate out the total cost of hosting those resources in Microsoft Azure. The Azure Pricing Calculator available online can be helpful if you know what Azure Services you need, but the Azure Cost Estimator tool can be more helpful for more complex scenarios. This is a free tool available directly from Microsoft. Read More

Many companies are migrating existing or building new systems on the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. There’s a lot of buzz lately around the Cloud overall, but it can be a little unclear at first glance what the benefits are. Microsoft Azure includes many different Infrastructure and Platform features that simply mirror those on-premises, as well as features that extend far beyond. Let’s explore some of the primary features of Microsoft Azure, along with reasons why they may be the right choice to use, so we can answer some of the common questions. While Microsoft Azure may be an obvious technical choice, it’s extremely important to answer these questions when conveying the benefits of Microsoft Azure to business decision makers. Read More

One of the many exciting new features to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform that Microsoft announces at AzureCon 2015 is the all new Azure GPU Compute. This allows for Virtual Machines (VMs) to utilize GPU’s hosted in the cloud. Now, even graphics processing and video rendering can be brought to “cloud scale” within Microsoft Azure. Read More

At the heart of the Microsoft Cloud are servers, networks, Internet connections, and much, much more! These data centers share a lot of qualities with traditional Enterprise data centers; such as fire suppression, humidity control, temperature control and more.

One major difference between the traditional Enterprise data center is that Microsoft uses Containers (called ITPACs) to build out it’s data centers. These Containers are Shipping Containers fitted with all the necessary climate control, networking, server racks and other hardware necessary to be a “mini” data center all in one. Then many of these are connected together within on of Microsoft’s Azure data centers to build out the full data centers. Read More